This invention relates to video disc systems and more particularly to video disc systems wherein the playback unit is used in an interactive mode.
Advancing technology has improved the quality of life of persons in today's society; however, it also has required that the citizens thereof become more knowledgeable in more areas. This requirement necessitates that the education process be similarly advanced and that better learning tools become available to the educators. One of such tools of recent vintage is the video disc system. This system allows video signals to be recorded on a disc and played back such that the output can be applied to a television receiver to display pictorial information and also provide sound. The video disc system has advantages over the video tape recorder in the education field since the system allows one to skip or move from one portion of the disc to a remote portion without moving through the intermediate portion of the disc grooves. This is done by directly moving the pickup drive mechanism from one portion of the disc to the other portion.
This feature readily permits branching such that when one portion of the disc is played back and displayed on the television receiver, a student, for example, can respond to the information on that portion of the disc by making a selection which will cause the disc system to select other portions of the disc to be played back depending upon the student's response. For example, in a testing situation, on the first portion of the disc, the student may be asked a question, and be provided with a multiple choice of answers. Depending on which answer the student selected, the playback unit will then branch to a particular portion of the disc. For example, if the student se1ected a correct answer the pickup may branch to a portion of the disc displaying information telling the student that he has selected the correct answer; however, if the student has selected an incorrect answer, the pickup may branch to a portion of the disc which would display information informing the student that he has selected the wrong answer and may also provide some additional material as, for example, some tutorial review of the material about which he showed lack of knowledge.
One major problem with moving the pickup to provide branching is that the branching is relatively slow. The time taken to branch to a new section of a disc after receipt of a branching command may be often a couple of seconds up to perhaps ten seconds. This is very disruptive to the continuity of the presentation and, in fact, it may be unacceptable in many training and educational applications.
Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide improved video disc branching.
It is another object of this invention to provide more rapid branching from one recorded selection of a video disc to another selection of the same disc which may be co-located in the same portion of the disc.